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The New Surrey: $500-million investment aimed at keeping up with population growth

Expanded Surrey Memorial Hospital will be a provincial centre for neo-natal care

Rowena Rizzotti, Executive Director of Clinical Programs and Operations, stands by the new $512-million critical-care expansion at Surrey Memorial Hospital.

Photograph by: Stuart Davis
, VANCOUVER SUN

Surrey Memorial Hospital is in the middle of a half-billion-dollar building boom — and now it needs to find hundreds of additional staff to work there.

About 650 jobs are being created along with a new emergency department, an attached eight-storey critical -care tower and renovations to the existing hospital, which is near the junction of King George Highway and 96 Avenue.

Administrators have already hired 120 people for the first 137 postings — with candidates from the region, B.C. and abroad. They include respiratory therapists, pharmacists, social workers, physiotherapists and registered nurses specializing in emergency rooms and intensive care.

Surrey Memorial is posting jobs in stages to coincide with the planned opening of the new emergency department on Oct. 1 and the critical care tower in the spring of 2014, said Rowena Rizzotti, executive director of clinical programs and operations.

Since many of the new jobs will be in the hospital’s specialty areas — neo-natal care, intensive care and emergency treatment — some health workers have been hired with the understanding that they’ll take required upgrading courses, she said. So far, the expansion project has sponsored 150 nurses for further training.

“Our recruitment to date has been quite successful and one of the strategies we have deployed has been to recruit nurses or pharmacists, then sponsor them in their education, Rizzotti said.

“With the addition of the new tower and many of the extension projects on the campus, the profile and services have changed and evolved over the years. It’s moved from being a very high-volume community-based hospital to becoming a highly specialized centre.”

Gravely ill infants and premature babies from across B.C. will be sent to Surrey’s new neo-natal intensive care unit, or NICU, once it opens in the critical care tower. This unit, with its 48 private rooms, will be connected by a second-floor passageway to the renovated and expanded ‘family birthing ward’ in the existing hospital building, It’s the second-busiest maternity ward in the province, after B.C. Women’s Hospital in Vancouver, delivering more than 4,200 babies a year.

When complete, Surrey Memorial will have 650 beds — a net gain of 150 beds, a rooftop helicopter pad and about 440 more parking spaces.

The changes have been a long time coming, with provincial governments promising to deal with the overwhelming demands from an exploding population over the past decade. But shovels didn’t hit the dirt until early 2011.

A whopping 35 per cent of B.C.’s population is served by Fraser Health’s 12 hospitals, making it the busiest health authority in the province. It covers an area from Burnaby to White Rock to Hope and Boston Bar with a population of 1.6 million. In comparison, Vancouver Coast Health serves 1 million in 13 hospitals.

And the population served by Fraser Health is expected to rise to 1.9 million by 2020.

Demand for improved health services in Surrey reached a fever pitch in 2005 after complaints about sub-standard treatment in its grossly over-crowded emergency department, which was designed for about 40,000 visits a year when it opened in 1959.

It gets more than 100,000 visits a year now, in a marginally expanded area that recently flooded when heavy equipment from the nearby construction cut through a water main.

The new ER is designed to provide separate treatment streams for children, patients with minor illnesses or injuries, mental health patients, and patients in critical condition.

The focus on emergency care is evident in the current postings for physicians, which include an ER doctor and a specialist in emergency care for children. Five other specialists’ position at Surrey Memorial are on Fraser Health’s website at a time when there is a general shortage of medical specialists across Canada.

Facts on Outpatient Centre:

The four-storey, $237-million Jim Pattison Outpatient Care and Surgery Centre opened in 2011 to provide services such as laboratory testing, X-rays, mammograms, CT and MRI scans, in addition to day surgeries, biopsies and managing chronic diseases like HIV/AIDS and hepatitis C.

It’s all designed for people who don’t need to stay overnight in hospital after their treatment and to take pressure off Surrey Memorial.

The facility is named for B.C. billionaire Jim Pattison, who donated $5 million and had it matched by donations from the community.

The Jim Pattison Outpatient Care centre is located a short distance from the main hospital at 140 Street and the Fraser Highway.

Dr. John Diggle, a neurologist who is the head of medical education at Surrey Memorial and a clinical assistant professor at University of British Columbia, says Surrey has been attracting new doctors, but not quickly enough to serve the growing population. He believes specialists will be more interested in Surrey Memorial because of its increasing capacity for research and teaching opportunities at both UBC and Simon Fraser University.

Late last month, for example, SFU, Surrey Memorial Hospital Foundation and the B.C. government put up $5.25 million to fund a new B.C. Leadership Chair in Multimodal Technology for Health Care Innovation, to be based at the hospital. Fraser Health announced that one of Canada’s top neuroscientists, Ryan D’Arcy, has been recruited for the job from his current position as head of the renowned Institute for Biodiagnostics in Halifax.

About 80 medical school graduates who are taking short-term residency training in various areas pass through Surrey Memorial each year. That’s expected to rise to about 125 a year after the critical care tower is open, said Rizzotti.

Diggle oversees a two-year program that trains family doctors and its first five graduates will finish in June. Of that group, three are looking at staying in Surrey. That’s significant because Surrey is under-served with about 56 doctors per 100,000 in population, about a third of Vancouver’s rate.

“I thought it was brilliant to train doctors in a place where recruitment is not keeping up with population growth.”

Since doctors tend to return to their home towns after graduation or stay where they completed their residency training, said Diggle, the hospital is expanding its residency program next year. It has accepted 10 applicants who graduated from foreign universities and 14 from Canadian universities. They’ll be eligible to apply for certification to practise in Canada after finishing the program.

“When I came here I did not know what to expect,” Diggle said

“I have been surprised at the calibre of the medicine, the support of the hospital and the infrastructure here, the enthusiasm to embrace an academic culture. When people actually come out here to practise, it’s going to be an awesome recruitment tool.”

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